


The faint aroma of snow

by imsfire



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: And thinking, Beaches, Character Study, Cold, F/M, Gen, Jyn has to go back to Lah'mu on a mission, Jyn-centric, Post-Scarif, Snow, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, feels and a bit of angst, lah'mu, mood piece
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 13:09:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11647215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: A rebel cell on Lah’mu makes contact, and Jyn and three others are despatched to liaise with them, to help set-up a network of smaller groups across the planet.  In theory her status as “someone who grew up there”, her supposed local knowledge, make her an ideal member of the team.  In practice she remembers little of use, and it’s no different from any other such mission.  She can avoid visiting the island where her family lived (she supposes there is a little parcel of land there that belongs to her, and the thought is a curious one, but she doesn’t feel strong enough to go there alone).  She can do her job and eat her rations, go to sleep each night, comm Cassian when she has the chance.  It’s just like any other mission, never mind the seaside views, never mind the childhood memories…





	The faint aroma of snow

As a rule, Jyn avoids beaches now. 

It’s strange, remembering that for most people the beach is a place of pleasure and relaxation, of remembered childhood games and longed-for romance.  Once, she would have thought the same; once, she remembered the sea fondly and sadly, and would have rejoiced at the sight of waves on sand and light on waves.  But that was before; and when a mission last year involved surveillance from a beach house, every day spent within sight of the waters’ edge, the sight and sound of the sea made her ill; appetite gone, sleep patterns shattered to chaos.  She barely managed to hold herself back from assaulting a colleague who ribbed her relentlessly for her dislike of going on the beach.

She knows Cassian feels the same.  Someday, they promise one another, this fear will fade, someday they’ll get it back into proportion; or, they will succeed in inuring themselves to it.  They both enjoy swimming, both learned to swim in the sea.  There has to be a way to get back to feeling calm in its proximity.  The fear is new, and after all, they both know exactly where and when it began.  It surely cannot be too resistant to a little gentle aversion therapy.  When they have the time.  If they ever do.

A rebel cell on Lah’mu makes contact, and Jyn and three others are despatched to liaise with them, to help set-up a network of smaller groups across the planet.  In theory her status as “someone who grew up there”, her supposed local knowledge, make her an ideal member of the team.  In practice she remembers little of use, and it’s no different from any other such mission except for one thing.  There are beaches everywhere.  Lah’mu is a planet of archipelagos and wild seas, and the wide shores of volcanic sand are famous for their beauty.  Wherever she goes, someone always ends up sooner or later wanting to show her a local beauty spot; and mostly that means a seashore.

She can avoid visiting the island where her family lived (she supposes there is a little parcel of land there that belongs to her, and the thought is a curious one, but she doesn’t feel strong enough to go there alone).  She can do her job and eat her rations, go to sleep each night, comm Cassian when she has the chance.  It’s just like any other mission, never mind the seaside views, never mind the childhood memories…

Perhaps this is the time to begin that aversion therapy.

She arrives with the others in the main town of the northern islands, and it’s the end of autumn, a bleak wet season and a small harvest, gathered in haste and anxiety.  People look at the evening sky, at the birds flying south in formation; they furrow their brows and say the clouds are wrong, there’s a cold snap coming.  Before long the weather closes in and suddenly there’s frost and ice and hail, and then snow, a deep snowfall overnight that blocks roads and piles into the angles of every window, every doorway and wall.  The air smells stiff when Jyn steps outside and the back of her throat tightens.  By mid-afternoon the main streets have been roughly cleared, but the snow starts again and continues into the night, and through the next day, and all the work is wasted. 

Everywhere she looks, there’s nothing else, just snow.  It drifts down constantly, ceaselessly, from heavy white skies.  It settles on the rooftops in the little harbour town, and inland on the mountains and the once-green moors, it buries the sky-corn fields and the bean-fields, smothers the grazing land.  It settles on the beaches, and the meeting of waves and strand becomes a gelid, grey place, a dark shifting mirror between white land and grey-white seas, under an iron quilt of sky.   There’s no light, and light everywhere, reflected off the snow.

Jyn has been standing on the quay at the far end of the town, looking out at the huge whiteness of the shore beyond and the stirring grey wonder of the sea, for some time, before she realises.  She’s on a beach, or as good as, and she’s not even unsettled by it.  Not a touch of panic in her.  It’s all so white and deadened, so cold, so silent.  It makes no pretence of prettiness, this winter seashore.  Inland, in the soil, and behind her, among the people of the town, there’s life under the snow.  Out here there’s just the ineluctable fact of it, the thick white mask covering everything.  It deadens the wave-crests, and the very sea is slow-shifting in its embrace.

It’s the worst start to the winter in over a decade.  If this goes on, one of her local contacts told her a few days ago, the ocean will freeze.  They dread the idea; air travel is dangerous in heavy snow fall, and ice floes would disrupt sea travel as well.  The isolation a bad winter brings can be terrible.

It can kill.  But it doesn’t pretend otherwise.  She can see a virtue in that.

Only, if this goes on, then she may be stuck here; and Cassian may not be able to come.  He has leave; and a visit was supposed to aid her cover.  He was supposed to arrive in the morning.  Only a couple of days ago she’d been announcing it cheerfully in the street: _My boyfriend is coming to stay, I’m looking forward  so much to seeing him!_

It’s still odd to call him that; odd to remember the term isn’t an unreasonable one.  She cares for him, loves him, is indeed wishing wholeheartedly to see him soon.  But – boyfriend?  It’s a word she’d never expected to use of anyone. 

She makes her way back along the quay and, carefully, down the steps at the landward end, onto the shore itself.  Walks out, along the strand, testing how far she can go, gradually picking her way closer and closer to the water’s edge.  The light is flat and matt and whitened at the fringes of vision, the snowfall goes on and on as the early dusk claws in around her.  She reaches the end of the long curve of sand and stands there, looking out at the water and breathing the smell of cold.  She can hear the sound of the snow falling, a whispering and pattering as though billions of ghosts are clapping their hands and murmuring feather-light praise in the sky.  Beneath their voices, the rhythm of the waves is rough on the black streak of sand at the tides’-edge.  Snowflakes land there and glisten for a few seconds before the next soft wave of darkness sweeps them away.  Above the waterline the white is featureless save for her boot-marks.

The darkness is getting thicker, gradually, imperceptibly; the slow, slow evening of high latitudes.  If it were a clear night she knows that there’d be a curtain of stars and a moon halfway to full, and all the fallen snow would reflect their light in a carpet of silver and dazzle.  She remembers the moonlit nights from childhood, and frost under the moon, a rare beauty, the fields sparkling like a princess’s dress.  But the cloud is low and dense and clotted tonight, and the snow falls.

Will Cassian be able to get here?  This time they spend apart is good, she knows; they could so easily have become horribly dependent on one another if their work didn’t keep doing this.  Jyn has been alone so much of her life that solitude is an accustomed state for her and a return to it is a chance to steady herself and recover focus.  But she had been looking forward to his visit; to talking to him, sleeping warm in his arms.  And it would have been good to bring him here, to say _Does it feel different to you?  It does to me.  The beach thing; I think I’ve broken through it._

She’s waiting.  She’s been waiting all day.  She commed him as soon as she heard the news, that the ground conditions and the blizzard will close the spaceports and air strips by morning.  So if he’s coming, he has to come a day early; it has to be today.  And the day is almost over.

Her footprints behind her are almost filled up now.  She turns back.  There will be hot food, back in the town, and tea to drink, and every room in every house will have a fire burning.  The team are staying in a hostel three streets up from the harbour.  There will be a lamp in a window, waiting for her to come home.  She turns to go into the shivering, shifting down-curtain of snow.

Crunch, crrch, crunch.  All other sounds muted, just the soft murmur of the snowfall, and the breathing of the sea, and her footsteps.  The strange light, and the faint aroma of snow.  Her lips are slightly numb, exposed to the air; but she’s toasty warm everywhere else, inside her thick coat.  She stops again to look back one last time, to enjoy the beauty and the solitude, and faintly, somewhere, the sound of footsteps continues.  Far off along the sea shore, along the quayside, on the steps, a figure moves towards her.  She starts that way again, her own boots making the same sound, crunch, crrkch, crrk; compressing thick fluffy snow down into coarse frozen sand.  Crrch, crrk, crunch, crrkch…

A man in a blue parka and a hat with ear-flaps comes crunching down the long white beach towards her, smiling.  

Away behind the blanket of snow-cloud, the sun must be long-gone; it’s a strange haunted evening, a darkness somehow still lit, with the street-lights of the harbour and the town in the distance shining through the falling veil of snow and reflecting on the pallor all around.  The sea is a dark voice in the void now, on her left. 

Cassian ignores it, tramping towards her, hands in gloves in pockets, white breath puffing.  Jyn quickens her pace, hurrying to meet him.

He could have stayed in the hostel, with the food and the hot tea, and the firelight.  He doesn’t have to come out into the storm and walk along the beach.  Doesn’t have to be here at all.  He could have spent his downtime somewhere green with forests, somewhere hot and relaxing.  He’s come to the winter of Lah’mu instead.

When they meet he holds out his arms, and she does likewise, and their hug is a lumpy bunchy one through thick padding and insulating woollens.  Cassian feels bulky and skinny at the same time, his own body the taut line within the warm wrapping of his coat and what must be at least three inner layers.  He’s grinning, breath white as smoke.  She pushes herself onto her tiptoes, though the heavy boot-soles are resistant to flexing.  When their faces meet she feels the tip of his nose, cold, and his cheeks and lips all chilled; chilled and then warm against her skin.  Knows she must feel colder yet, since she’s been outside for an hour or more.

His kiss is hot as a furnace, he exhales and his breath on her face feels like steam.

When their lips part at last he says huskily “You’re all snowy.”

There’s a snowflake on his moustache already, white and fluffy on the soft dark hair.  She brushes it away with the tip of her glove.  Tomorrow there’ll be time enough to talk, time to come back to the beach, and perhaps to say _Please will you come with me to the place where I grew up?_

Because with him, and with the snow to mask everything, perhaps she might be able to go there. 

For now, it’s time to be indoors again, and warm. “Of course I am, it’s a snowy night,” Jyn says.  “Let’s go home.”

**Author's Note:**

> I saw a tiny, almost cartoon-style piece of fan-art on tumblr of Jyn and Cassian hugging, with what looked like snowflakes falling around them, and this was the result. Title comes from the last track on the album "Automatic" by Channel Light Vessel.


End file.
